HPD still hunting troubled woman's killer more than year later

Search for justice continuesNichole Bailey's life was a string of bad choices that ended with her murder in a weed-filled ditch in southeast Houston

CLAUDIA FELDMAN, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published 5:30 am, Monday, August 1, 2011

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Five days after Nichole Lee Bailey was killed, her body was found in a garbage bag.

Five days after Nichole Lee Bailey was killed, her body was found in a garbage bag.

Photo: Handout Photo

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Keri Walker grieves at the spot where the body of her daughter, Nichole Bailey, was found. "I failed Nichole in life but I'm trying to get her justice now," she said.

Keri Walker grieves at the spot where the body of her daughter, Nichole Bailey, was found. "I failed Nichole in life but I'm trying to get her justice now," she said.

Photo: Michael Paulsen, Chronicle

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HPD Sgt. Brian Harris continues to investigate the killing of Nichole Bailey, including visiting the apartment complex where she was last seen alive. Part of his job, he says, is to speak for the dead.

HPD Sgt. Brian Harris continues to investigate the killing of Nichole Bailey, including visiting the apartment complex where she was last seen alive. Part of his job, he says, is to speak for the dead.

Photo: Michael Paulsen, Chronicle

HPD still hunting troubled woman's killer more than year later

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The end of the road for Nichole Lee Bailey was a ditch filled with water and weeds in southeast Houston. The Julia Roberts look-alike had been beaten, strangled and stuffed into a black plastic garbage bag. Five days passed before neighbors found the grisly package and called police.

Today, more than a year later, Bailey's family and two Houston police officers are still determined to find her killer and see justice done. They know that Bailey was a troubled woman who made bad choices, but in the end, they say, that's not what matters.

Bailey's problems began in early adolescence, when the sunny child who loved to read and play the clarinet was molested by her stepfather. Keri Walker, Bailey's mother and a receptionist for a local manufacturing company, says she didn't know the sexual abuse was taking place. She also says she tried to take the appropriate, healing steps as soon as she found out.

But she was too late.

In school, Bailey was a quick study and made friends easily. But the girl with the perfect features and mane of reddish-brown hair eventually dropped out and supported herself by working as an exotic dancer. When she was fired from clubs because she was too high or too drunk to work, she turned to prostitution, her mother says.

Experts on sexual abuse are not surprised by the path Bailey took. They say roughly 100,000 children are sexually abused every year in the United States, and some recover, and some don't. Sometimes the damage can't be undone.

In her 20s, Bailey was pregnant three times. But just as she ran from all the adults who loved her, she ran from her children, too. (A 10-year-old girl lives with her father, a 5-year-old boy lives with Walker and 3-year-old twins live with an adoptive family in Northeast Texas.)

Throughout, Walker tried to help, but she had emotional wounds of her own, and none of her many attempts to change Bailey's behavior had any effect. Finally, in desperation, Walker said she was going to stop rescuing Bailey, who was in and out of jail for prostitution and drug possession. Walker also told her daughter she couldn't hang around the apartment if she was battered or trying to hide from police.

"Nichole," Walker would say, worried about the children in and out of her home, "you can't bring all that stuff around here."

Walker adds, horrified, "Sometimes she would try to solicit business from the front porch."

Sitting in a Denny's near her Pasadena home, Walker wipes away tears with a wadded-up napkin. She knows she made mistakes with Bailey, and she goes over them every night, when she cries herself to sleep.

The only thing that will bring Walker any comfort, she says, is seeing Bailey's killer charged and convicted. She's never met Sgt. Harris or investigator Millard "Fil" Waters, the men tasked with that job, but she sends Harris regular emails with common themes:

One is, "I failed Nichole in life but I'm trying to get her justice now."

It's a message Harris takes to heart.

He's been trolling Bailey's working-class neighborhood since last summer. He's become acquainted with many of Bailey's prostitute friends. He's interviewed the two men who paid for her services the night she died. He's been to the decrepit apartment building where she was dropped off, then picked up that very last time. He's kept in touch with the man who flunked lie-detector questions about the end of Bailey's life and her death.

Harris knows some people might wonder why he is trying so hard to solve this case. The sex trade is big business in Houston: He estimates several thousand prostitutes are working at any given time. Of that group, he says, a few go missing every year — as many as 15 to 20 since 2005.

Part of his job, part of every homicide detective's job, Harris says, is to speak for the dead.

Bailey spent her childhood in Colorado. She was a funny, self-confident kid who loved animals and hoped to work with them when she grew up.

Life promised to get even better when her mom got married in 1981. The new husband seemed to adore his new wife and his stepdaughter, too.

The couple had two more children. But somewhere along the line, Walker says, the man she thought she knew turned into a batterer. It was humiliating, Walker says, when he beat her in front of the kids.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

When he worked days and Walker worked nights, she says, he plied Bailey with alcohol and drugs and forced her to have sex.

Bailey was 12 and 13 at the time.

When Walker finally understood what was happening and confronted him, she says he told her, "You were no longer my wife. I had to replace you."

As policy in Colorado courts, the names of sex crime victims are kept confidential. The records do show, however, that the stepdad was sentenced to jail for 90 days for sexual assault in 1990 and was told to attend alcohol, drug and sex-offender treatment programs. He also was told to pay restitution to the victim and serve four years' probation and 150 hours of public service.

Walker gathered the children and moved to Houston in 1992.

A fresh start, she thought, would help them all.

But it did nothing for Bailey. She was only 17 when she dropped out of Channelview High School and went to work as an exotic dancer.

"She liked it," Walker says. "She was very good at it. She was a beautiful girl with a great figure, and she knew how to manipulate guys. She knew how to manipulate, period."

On good nights at the clubs, Bailey could earn $600 or $700. Customers loved the loud and boisterous dancer, then 5-foot-2 and 110 pounds. She loved music, she loved to dance and she craved attention.

Bailey was careless with all the cash she was earning, but she saved enough to buy a car and rent a nice apartment, her mother says. By her mid-20s, however, everything started to slip away. She was drinking heavily, doing drugs including marijuana, crack cocaine, even embalming fluid, and her performances suffered. Inevitably, she'd get into fights with the other dancers. She drifted from club to club until she'd run through the long list of venues.

She gave up drinking, her mother says, but smoked increasing amounts of crack. Bailey could think of only one way to support that very expensive habit.

Sgt. Harris picks up the story as he cruises in Bailey's old hunting grounds. His first stop is a one-story apartment building off Griggs Road. The dingy, beige structure looks like housing of the last resort.

May 31, Memorial Day 2010, Bailey and a prostitute friend were supposed to meet at the apartments after a night of work. From Bailey's cellphone records, Harris knows that she was on the premises a little after midnight.

To be precise, it was 12:05 a.m., June 1. Bailey had just had sex with two brothers.

Serenity, the friend waiting for Bailey, tells police she never showed. Harris thinks Bailey was picked up one last time, brutally murdered within the hour, then dumped in the ditch in front of 8 West Court Drive.

An acquaintance of Bailey's wanders up to talk to Harris.

Both use Bailey's street name.

"I've been knowing Celeste six or seven years," says the woman who introduces herself as Lynn. "She was a working girl. She had Room 18," and she gestures behind her.

On the front door is a long list of handwritten rules. No. 1 is "no solicitations."

Lynn says Bailey could make $500 in a couple of hours. But it was never enough because of her crack habit.

"It's not even good 30 minutes," Lynn says. "Then you want it again."

Harris' next stop is the apartment of Gabriel Rodriguez, who was Bailey's on-again, off-again, live-in boyfriend.

Harris bangs on the apartment door. A short, sleepy man peeks out. He's wearing dirty pants and a gray undershirt, and his arms and chest are covered in tattoos.

"Come in," he says. In his tiny living room are multiple photos of Bailey.

"I tried to keep her off the streets," Rodriguez says. "I wanted her to stop doing what she was doing. She was a sweet person, but she had a crack problem."

Rodriguez knows about problems; he has been in prison twice for robbery.

"I'm trying to straighten my life out," he tells Harris.

The sergeant's face is blank.

"That night, I was trying to find Celeste," Rodriguez tells Harris. "I kept calling and calling. But she didn't answer."

A few days later, Rodriguez heard that a body had been found in a nearby ditch and that the dead woman had breast implants. Rodriguez says he went to investigate and thought he recognized the decaying body. He was sure when he saw her front.

Harris leaves. With Rodriguez's paranoid tendencies and criminal history, the sergeant says, there could be many reasons he flunked key questions on the polygraph administered early in the investigation.

Harris has several more stops to make before getting back to work on other murder cases. He pulls into a driveway on Airport - and one of the brothers who hired Bailey the night of her death is home.

Harris wonders aloud if the brothers accidentally crushed her during sex.

Agitated, the brother says, "No!"

Harris makes note of his chapped, burned lips - typical of someone who smokes crack - and turns to leave. The brothers are auto mechanics. Harris says they've been known to lower their prices for pretty women willing to spend time with them in their shed.

Finally, Harris returns to the ditch on West Court Drive.

On the first anniversary of Bailey's death, her mother left pink roses and sunflowers. On that broiling summer day, Walker knelt in the grass and the weeds, as if to be closer to her daughter. Then she stood, tilted her face skyward and raised her voice.

"I love you," she said, the tears flowing again.

Harris believes that Bailey knew her killer, and he also believes there are some people in the ' hood who know what happened. Until someone helps him crack the case, he will continue to visit her old friends once a month, maybe more.

Up and down Griggs, Telephone, Mykawa, Wayside and Airport, there are big trees, mom-and-pop businesses, neat and affordable neighborhoods. As Harris cruises Bailey's old stomping grounds, however, he sees a darker place - cheap hotels that rent by the hour, privacy walls that hide drug deals, and men walking the street.

"They're not the unemployed," says Harris. "They're looking for their next deal, their next scam."

The one thing he's not likely to see, Harris says, is a prostitute.

In the old days, he says, women in the sex trade walked the streets, and there was some limited protection in being out in the community and visible to passers-by.

But Bailey conducted most of her business the modern way, via the Internet. It was safer and more convenient for her customers - for them purchasing sex online was as easy as ordering a pizza. But it was much more dangerous for her.

Bailey used her street name on her ad on Backpage.com. It read, "Hi, I'm Celeste with the BIG BREAST."

She used little punctuation or grammar - at times she even misspelled her name. She didn't cite prices but used this code:

"100 roses, 30 minutes, 200.hr."

Bailey tried to go straight multiple times. Her mom helped her get a job as a dispatcher for a security company, and she was so proud of her first legitimate paycheck that she posed with it for a photo.

After a few weeks, however, her mother had to fire her for bringing marijuana to work.

"She was used to making so much money dancing," her mother says by way of explanation. "She was bored by a regular job."

Bailey also would straighten up in jail. In 2007, she wrote Walker saying that while she was locked up, she was going to church, parenting classes and a 12-step program.

"I know I still have a long road ahead of me," Bailey wrote. "I'm going to do my best to make you proud of me. I love you, Mom."

Bailey sent another letter from jail on Mother's Day 2009. She and her mom shared a July 6 birthday, and Bailey said she hoped they would be able to celebrate together. "It's been a long time," she wrote. "It would be the best present ever."

Walker still remembers that party.

Bailey showed up with 50 roses because it was Walker's 50th birthday. Then they went to one of their favorite restaurants, Little Mexico, with Bailey's sister and middle child.